This invention has relation to an apparatus for aiding a person needing a walker to be able to travel up and down stairs. It has long been known to provide stands for use by persons not able to walk without help. Such stands customarily are of lightweight metal and have four legs supported on the floor with appropriate bars innerconnecting the legs at a top portion, these bars being positioned at a height where a person needing aid can reach them from a wheelchair and can, when pulled to an upright position, lean on them while walking. The walkers are picked up and set ahead by the person using them so such person can lean on the walker in taking the next step(s).
As far as structure is concerned, walkers of the prior art will operate in the same manner as the walker in the condition illustrated at FIG. 1 in U.S. Pat. No. 3,421,529 granted in January of 1969 to Vestal.
Such walkers have been very important over the years in giving a person with a walking difficulty an ability to move around on one floor, and this has been important practically from the standpoint of the person's well-being and psychologically from the standpoint of giving a certain feeling of independence. Such aids have, however, allowed such disadvantaged persons to move effectively only on the floor on which they are situated; so that small nursing homes and hospitals and like institutions have very often been designed as single story structures, or have been required to go to the expense of providing elevator service where more than one floor is used.
More importantly, most such disadvantaged persons live primarily in private homes, and such persons have, before the present invention, been confined to one story of such homes except for relatively rare occasions when one or more persons are available to help them up or down the stairs to another story. In much too large a number of cases, this results in the older or other disadvantaged person living out a very major portion of his or her life on an upper story without substantial meaningful contact with people other than the immediate family.
In an attempt to alleviate this problem, efforts have been made to provide structures which will aid persons with walking disabilities or difficulties to traverse stairways.
These include the aforementioned patent to Vestal, in which an elaborate walker is so designed that it can be manually adjusted to provide bearing surfaces on three steps of a stairway at the same time, thus attempting to provide a contraption which the user can lift up or down from one step to the next while lifting himself up or down in between movements of the walker. See FIG. 3 of Vestal.
Among the difficulties with the Vestal apparatus is the fact that the person using this "paraplegic aid" must lift it from step to step and, in so doing, may lose his balance and suffer a severe fall. Further, when arriving at the top or the bottom of the stairway, there is no effective way to adjust the structure from the position as seen in FIG. 3 to the position as seen in FIG. 1 without balancing at the top or bottom step and having to reach down to manually operate the locking devices such as those shown at 48 and 60. It would appear that, in most cases, the ability to operated the paraplegic aid to convert it from stepwalking to floorwalking configuration is beyond the capabilities of the disadvantaged person using it.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,785,487 granted to McAvoy in December of 1930 discloses a gate which is mounted across the stairway and is supported in a rail for sliding movement down and up a stairway. The idea is to have a brake mechanism on the gate so that a person can walk down the stairway leaning on the gate. This brake mechanism limits the rate of speed with which the gate can move downwardly. The apparatus is biased in such a manner that when the gate is released at the bottom, it will travel by itself up to the top of the stairs to be ready for the next person coming down.
The McAvoy structure is obviously expensive to install and is effective only to aid people in coming from the top toward the bottom of the stairway. It is in reality only a safety device to prevent people from losing their balance and falling on the way downstairs. The user has no control over rate of descent, and if it were too fast for his capabilities, he would have to "hang on" and literally ride down on the gate.
Presumably a disadvantaged person moving up the stairs would have to use the ordinary railings provided, and would, upon reaching the closed gate, have to lift it vertically upwardly and then back down a step or two to swing the gate toward him to obtain access to the room at the top of the stairs. This would appear to be an expensive and dangerous means of attempting to provide assistance for disadvantaged persons in navigating stairways.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,782,796 granted in February of 1957 to Blue, shows a very simple walking stick or cane type arrangement having an elongated block 12 providing a platform surface so that the cane or stair-walking aid will be free standing. The disadvantaged person utilizes the device substantially like a cane being used on a flat surface. The lack of stability of such a device for walking up or down stairs is evident. The device will provide no help if any substantial unbalance should occur, and, in that case, a dangerous fall will be inevitable.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,576,556 granted in November of 1951 to Babson discloses a escalator-like hand rail which moves continuously in an upward direction along either side of a stairway to allow someone walking up the stairs to support weight thereon so that the walking will be less arduous. The obvious disadvantage to this structure in assisting persons to move from a lower floor to an upper floor is that the speed of the hand rails is constant and continuous, and a person who must in effect think about each move and gather resources before making that move could not use the device. There is no provision for allowing people to move down a stairway with the help of the movable hand rail. Even if the direction of the hand rail were reversed for such use, there would be no facility to go up to the top until the drive was again reversed.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,591,874 granted in July of 1971 to O'Kennedy shows a structural aid for an individual consisting of a bar supported over a frame adapted to be gripped by the individual when in seated position and useful to allow the invalid to raise himself from seated to standing position. Other than showing the use of a bar to support the weight of a person having a disability or difficulty in movement, it is not believed to be pertinent to the invention.
From the above summary, it is evident that no prior art device or apparatus provides a structure which is positively positioned against forward or backward movement to bear substantially the entire weight of a user while moving up or down one step at a time, and which can be very easily moved ahead up or down the width of a single step by the user while standing firmly on one step in preparation for taking the next step up or down.
The applicant caused a preliminary search to be made on the invention, and the five patents referred to above were all of the patents located in the search. Applicant and those in privity with him know of no closer prior art than that set out above; and they know of no prior art which anticipates the claim made in this application.